Camilla bit her lip sharply and trembled. She flung off her beautiful theatre wrap, and stood deliberating with the letter unopened in her hand. Then with a sort of grim shadow on her face she took the plunge, and tore open the envelope.
The very look of the letter, with its straight, hard characters had an accusing tone about it. It started without any courteous beginning.
It was a horrible letter for Camilla Lancing to read. Clearly, coldly, uncompromisingly the writer put before her his knowledge of all those many facts that she had worked so hard to keep concealed from him.
Her life of debt and difficulty, her extravagances, her gambling, her friends, and her follies were denounced in hard, deliberate terms.
She was judged without mercy, without a chance of defence; and her sentence was written in the same hard, merciless way.
Colonel Lancing announced that the allowance he had made her since his son's death was taken from her; her independence was to cease at once.
"My son's children have been left too long in the miserable atmosphere of the life you affect; they are no longer infants, and I claim them. They will come to my home, and be reared in the way they should be reared, and if you conform to my commands you may live with them. But let us understand one another clearly. Here there will be permitted no reckless folly, no sinful waste; none of those things that have brought you to where you are. You will be given a place with my daughters, because you are the children's mother, and for no other reason; your life will be ordered entirely by me, and in accordance with what I hold to be proper and fit for a woman in your position. Refuse this, and I wash my hands of you; you may sink to what depth you like. But the children shall not sink. I have been patient too long, hoped too long. I now see that there is no good in you, and I mean to stand between these children and the harm you would do them."
Camilla stood like one transfixed.
The letter fluttered from her hand and lay on the floor.
The strong light of the electric light that was placed above her long mirror fell mercilessly upon her.